Filed under: Fatherhood | Tags: baby, Becoming a Dad, colic, Fatherhood, parenthood, park and ride
So I stepped on the park-and-ride bus this morning and sat down in my usual seat, just two row back front the door against the window. Every morning when I get on, I usually notice random strangers idly chatting. I can always hear it but usually ignore them. After all, these are not my conversations and I want to sleep anyway. But this morning was very different because just when I’m about to doze off I hear a man remark to the bus driver, “Yeah man, we find out on Tuesday.”
Naturally my ears perked up immediately and spontaneously, my voice bursting out of nowhere to ask the man, ”Are you and your wife were having a baby?”
From there happened the most fulfilling bus ride of my life.
He and I must have talked about everything relating to impending fatherhood. He told me about his experience the first-time around… About the struggle of trying like hell to have one baby with a wife that wasn’t able, only to discover the miracle of finding out he’s having not one but two. About having twin babies born three-months premature and driving to the hospital (same as ours) to see them every day, despite living 45-minutes away and working ten hour days… About how, looking back at it all seven years later, he still looks at his boys sometimes and thinks, in his own words, “I still can’t believe I’m a father.” And finally about how he’s fortunate enough now to be able to do it all over again.
It really motivates me to hear stories from other parents.
I learn a lot from them and experiences like today’s. Like how scooping the bubbles out of the milk and how that will help avoid colic. And how taking walks in public places with mother-to-be will make them seem much less tedious than walking in the neighborhood. And how not to splurge on a crib because the baby will sleep more in the bassinet anyway. And finally that the baby should learn his schedule right away, so he knows day is day and night is time for sleep so we can actually get some rest.
Goodness, we must have talked the whole thirty minutes into downtown like dorks without even noticing it.
Thanks man.
Filed under: Food | Tags: New Orleans, houston, Restaurant Review, Crescent City, NOLA, Po'Boy, Calliope's, Louisiana-style cooking, Foodie, Cajun, sandwich, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-style eatery
Having eaten in New Orleans-style eateries ever since I moved to Houston from New Jersey, I thought I had a good handle on what constituted Crescent City cuisine. I knew what gumbo was… I’ve had many Po’Boys… But little did I know that I had been missing the key to good NOLA food all along.
You see, ole boy, it’s the intricate details that distinguish good New Orleans-style sandwiches from the rest. And despite the fact that I named the Po’Boy as one of America’s Top 10 Greatest Sandwiches prior to this review, I never really had one that truly captured my taste buds in such a way as it did about two weeks ago.
It was then that DNC Attorney-At-Large and our resident Bourbon Street expert, Eric Junker, wanted to pick me up for lunch in downtown Houston. Eric said he had something specific in mind, as he had been meaning to try out a Po’Boy place by the name of Calliope’s (pron: cal-eye-oh-pees) for quite some time. You see, Junker is a true foodie when it comes to Cajun / Louisiana-style cooking. I would even go so far as to call him a snob in that respect. So I knew he would be highly critical in judging this place afterwards.
We both agreed that we discovered at Calliope’s was nothing short of what is likely to be, without a doubt, the best Po’Boy place in Houston. And not only are their ingredients fresh and high-quality, but the portions at Calliope’s are significantly larger than what you’d typically get at your typical Cajun sandwich place. I think both Eric and I were very impressed with this unassuming little shop in the warehouse district. Personally, I loved the gumbo. The oyster in there was really key.
While we were eating, Eric questioned the owner, Lisa, on just about everything from how long they cook their red beans to who makes their bread. (they do.) She even shared a little of their history with us. It turns out that they’ve had a long time to perfect their unique brand of New Orleans cuisine. Calliope’s journey actually began right in the heart of New Orleans and they’ve taken it to Haddisburg, Mississippi before the disastrous Hurricane Katrina landed then in our space city of Houston, TX.
Co-owner Lisa Carnley had this to say about Calliope’s on their newly-formed Facebook fan page:
“We are the first in Houston of a 20 year tradition of Po’Boy shops run by our family. Our food is great because the recipes have been tweaked and polished through years of experience.Our vision is to bring an authentic New Orleans Po’Boy to the city of Houston. It all starts with fresh cooked french bread. New Orleans style french bread has a distinctive look and texture that was particularly difficult to duplicate in Houston. Like any sandwich we are only as good as our contents. Our seafood is fried and battered to perfection. We also feature a very authentic sloppy roast beef po’boy with homemade gravy. We are confident that you won’t find a po’boy in town that can compare to ours.
Calliope’s opened in Houston on 3/24/2009. We hope that you can take the time to stop by our neighborhood, located on the edge of downtown, and check it out.”
My Final Verdict is that this place is best New Orleans-style eatery in Houston. But I’m probably not the authority you should ask. I’ll leave it to Junker to give our readers his final summation of Calliope’s…
“The red beans and rice are authentic New Orleans. Hands down the best in Houston.” Says Eric. “The key is in the bread. It’s as close to anything at Mother’s or Johnny’s in the French Quarter as you’ll find. The attention to minute details sets them apart.” – Julius Eric Junker, Attorney specializing in Estate Planning, Probate, and Wealth Management in Richmond, Texas.
Additional Information on Calliope’s:
- Address: 2130 Jefferson, Houston, TX 77003
- Phone: (713) 222-8333
- Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
- Houston Press Review of Calliope’s.
- Diner Reviews from Yelp.
Filed under: Fatherhood | Tags: baby, expectant father, Fatherhood, mother, twitter, ultrasound
For those of you wondering – I saved my immediate reactions earlier from while I was in the waiting room and immediately after I found out the sex of our baby while mom-to-be was getting dressed.
July 7 – 10:30am
Megan must be inside getting her ultrasound done. When they called her name earlier, we were walking in together and I was immediately accosted at the doorway by this cold and unfeeling nurse, who said they were “only taking patients. we’ll call family when we’re ready for you.” &$%@… So I’ve been waiting outside imaging for almost two hours now.Thankfully, I’m actually not as nervous as I thought I would be… That probably has something to do with the fact that I barely slept last night, brooding of life’s possibilities and the differences between having a son or a daughter. Well, actually it was alternating between those thoughts to playing video games and back that kept me occupied. I wore myself out. And now, I think I’ll be at peace either way. After all, ultimately I guess no matter what we have, we’re going to have to raise this child the same exact way, the best we can. We’ll see what happens in a few minutes.
July 7 – 11:15am
Oh my God – words can’t express how happy I feel right now! Inevitably, I knew I’d be emotional during this but whatever I thought I was going to feel at this moment pales in comparison to the joy that is running through me. I never cried such tears of happiness in my life. When the nurse came and got me, it felt so suspenseful, the walk back towards the exam room. I felt almost tunnel-visioned, and if I could have quieted down my thoughts to a non-screaming level, I swear I could have felt my heart beat out of my chest. And when I got to Megan and saw the nurse moving the ultrasound stick thing around, I was so mentally prepared to hear that our baby was a girl. Then it happened. The nurse found what she was looking for and told us so matter of factly that our baby was in fact a boy! Oh believe me, it was a big blur from there. All I can recall was clapping my hands loud and sort of leaping up in an immediate and spontaneous reaction. I think my feet actually left the ground for a second before I hugged and kissed Megan. Now mind you, I actually tried to promise to myself that I wouldn’t cry. I actually held together pretty well other than a tear or two, but then the nurse left the room and I completely broke down in tears all over poor Megan. Crying like the little girl that I thought I would have. Happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. And as we were leaving the Doctor’s office, I just wanted to tell everyone I saw as I walked by. Walking out the door, I actually made eye contact at some poor guy that was probably waiting for his own spouse. Fist pump, “It’s a BOY!
Filed under: Fatherhood | Tags: Becoming a Dad, Fatherhood, Fourth of July, Independence Day, TX, TX Declaration of Independence, Washington, Washington on the Brazos State Park
Fourth of July – Texas Style
So this was my first Fourth of July without the traditional beer and BBQ. It was also certainly my last Independence Day prior to becoming a dad. Both startling thoughts.
Megan and I decided to celebrate in an entirely different way this year, traveling to the birthplace of Texas to celebrate the birthplace of our nation. Now when we embarked on this journey, I had no idea what to expect. After all, I thought that Texas came from a little old place we like to call Mexico. But what I discovered an hour and a half away from home in Washington on the Brazos State Park was something I appreciated way more than watching silly fireworks.
We wandered around for a good while after we got to the park. Outside of walking the trails, taking pictures besides the barn where they signed the TX Declaration of Independence, and spending time with our good friends, the Talavera’s, who also made the trek, the greatest joy I gleamed from this experience was learning that this was one of Megan’s favorite places in her own childhood. Seeing the joy in her manner as she taught me about the history of the place (what happened there), what animals made the tracks by the lake (probably dogs), and the names of common TX wildflowers (red - Indian Paintbrush, blue - Bluebonnet, yellow - One-Eyed Susans) – that was what made this trip to Washington, TX worthwhile for me.
Just so you know, I’m pretty much an inside-cat and not an outdoor one. But going to this place was even worth the allergic reaction on the way home (horrible), the splinters and blisters on both feet, (painful) and the mildly-sprained ankle from the fields we parked in. (annoying) If for nothing else than the fact that I was able to get to know the mother of my child just a little bit better. I wouldn’t have traded it for all the beer and BBQ in the world.
Below are some pictures from our trip to Washington on the Brazos State Park.
Filed under: Technology | Tags: 21st century, 3g, aol, CNN, Facebook, followers, globalization, instant messenger, iphone, maintstream adoption, management, michael jackson, Myspace, new media, Pulitzer Prize, reuters, social media, society, technologu, tmz, traditional media, twitter, viral
“thinks tweets are for birds, not men…”
I recently saw the above comment on the Facebook feed of a good friend of mine. Obviously he does not yet understand Twitter yet or simply has not chosen to use it. And that’s alright. There are many like him. The non-early adopters who don’t yet see the value of a resource until society as a whole deems it okay. Now since I have not written much about Twitter (or Facebook) in-depth since I published my Twitter Guide for Newbies back in February 2009, I thought this would be a good opportunity to update the world on why these networks have gained popularity and will become commonplace in the years to come.
In more recent article, Ashton Kutcher, CNN, Twitter’s Million Followers, and Why it’s all Relevant, I wrote about the @aplusk and @CNNbrk’s race to be the first Twitter account to 1,000,000 followers. Well that exposure proved to be a landmark event in social media, breaking down a section of the proverbial Berlin Wall so to speak. To date, that race exposed Twitter to the masses on a scale previously unseen. Because of it, even Oprah, arguably the world’s most popular woman, joined Twitter and from there, the world started to take notice. And then it slowly started to happen, mainstream acceptance.
So why have Twitter and Facebook gained so much traction recently? Well it’s easy enough to see. It’s because they provide a way to share and receive real-time information on the go. These networks ARE social media. They’re the new meeting place of the masses. Where AOL Messenger, and even IM, are the equivalent of a rotary phone, these social media networks are the latest in 3G I-phone technology. (and available on that device as well) As proven in the mainstream news with the Iran elections and more recently this past week with the celebrity deaths of Farrah Fawcett, BIlly Mays, and Michael Jackson, Facebook and Twitter allow for the fastest way for breaking news to go viral. Nothing else even comes close.
While traditional media channels like CNN and Reuters have to go through a series of approvals like a traditional corporate hierarchy before they are able to release information, Twitter takes news straight from the source and enables the population at large to inform each other without going through the “chain of command.” That’s why sites like Harvey Levin’s TMZ have largely become popular, because of the fact that their bloggers can report news straightaway. Streamlined. Flat. Immediate. Uncensored. Cutting out the middleman altogether.
The success of sites like TMZ and social networks like Twitter and Facebook can be likened to the same shift that corporate organizations have evangelized post-2000, the dawn of the age of globalization. In The World is Flat by Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman, the author travels to Bangalore, India to identify the forces that have leveled the playing field between industrial and emerging market countries. The gist of the whole book is that in order for corporations to succeed in today’s globalized economy, companies are being forced to flatten their corporate structures and reduce chains of command in order to move quicker, become more streamlined, and respond to their markets in real-time. That’s 21st century management. It’s the implementation of that thought process that is going to enable these companies to survive. We’ve been taught this in our university lectures ever since I was a freshman in college, and I graduated in 2005. Companies who continue to do business “the old way” will inevitably die out, they say. Nonetheless, this flattening of structures is a hard pill to swallow for many traditionalists who don’t seem to grasp concepts as quickly as the techie web 2.0 first-adopter types.
Even now, I almost can’t believe that I referred to CNN and Reuters as “traditional” media channels. Just a few years ago, weren’t we calling these websites “new media” and your local newspapers like The Houston Chronicle traditional media? Well now when you want news, do you go pull out the newspaper or do you go online? Folks, you’ve witnessed a changing of the guard in the past few years, and you barely even noticed it.
So what do these facts about globalization and news organizations have to do with Twitter and Facebook? It’s rather simple if you think about it. If these types of changes are happening in big business and changing the way we receive our news now versus ten years ago, don’t you think the process will filter down to the fundamental basis of how we communicate as a society? Like I said, it can be tough to swallow if you’re used to doing things the old way. As human beings, we are naturally resistant to change. Yet the fact remains evident that this is where society is going on a whole, viral and real-time. Gone are the days where you had to wait for a friend to call a friend who called a friend who told you about something. That’s all happening now. And its all happening instantly on Twitter and Facebook.
An example: Earlier this very morning, I tweeted that I was at Firestone getting some auto maintenance done. No less than two minutes later, @ricardotalavera responds to me that 2 tires of his own vehicle had just blown out, he and his wife were stranded, and needed to find out whether Discount Tire by our gym was open. Within another minute, I responded back with the info on Discount Tire and an offer for picking them up. @xtalx chimed in around the same time offering Ricardo a ride as well. I found out an hour later that they were okay, doing some shopping at Babies-R-Us.
me: Getting car serviced on day off. Why are guys in auto shops always named Jerry??? Yer bringin’ out the southern accent ah never had Jerry!about 3 hours ago from TwitterRide
Ricardo: @mikecalimbas dude try getting both passenger seat tires blow. Front and back at same time. Oh yeah Liz and I are stranded about 3 hours ago from Twitterrific in reply to mikecalimbas
me: @ricardotalavera you want me to call around and try to send someone???about 3 hours ago from TwitterRide in reply to ricardotalavera
Tal: @ricardotalavera yeah where yall at?if ur near me I’ll come give you guys a ride.about 3 hours ago from Twitterrific in reply to ricardotalavera
Ricardo: @xtalx thanks dude an also @mikecalimbas. Cop came and got us tow truck. Car at discount tire now while @liztalavera and I at Babies R Usabout 2 hours ago from Twitterrific in reply to xtalx
So how would I explain Facebook and Twitter to the Average Joe? I’d tell him these sites are IM and E-Mail on steroids. Not just encompassing a small subsection of his friends, but everyone he could possibly network with and an even larger segment of the population if he wanted that. They allow Joe to communicate with anyone in the world he desired to connect with, should they choose to listen. Twitter is the new Instant Messenger and Facebook is the new Myspace – which was the new usernet message board, which was the new after-school club that met only on Wednesday nights. And the last thing I’d tell Joe? he’d better adopt sooner rather than later because I promise, eventually, he’s going to have to do it anyway.
Follow author @mikecalimbas on Twitter!
BONUS – A funny text message conversation from Ricardo & Darkness on the same subject of Twitter and his car.
July 3rd @ 10:22am
Darkness: You training today?
Me : I was planning to. But I am now at discount tire. Just got 2 blown tires on my Audi.
Darkness: No way really I know the feeling.
Me: But Of course if you were Twitting you already knew that.
Darkness: I told you I will not join that I am going to resist as much as I can.
Me: You so selfish.
Darkness: No I just don’t want to follow I want to be a leader.
Me: Exactly then you step it up and get people to follow YOU.
